I'm out of shape

I haven't been out on my in-laws' boat in about a year and haven't been wakeboarding since then either. Last night, they felt guilty that we hadn't been out with them and so we went to the lake. Everyone did a great job out on the water, getting up on the first try (I won't mention who didn't) and dealing really well with the rough water. The water felt really nice, by the way. When I got out on the water and moving around in the wake, I could almost instantly feel my legs saying, "Really? You do nothing for a year and then expect that we'll just do this like it were nothing?"

I'll level with you, sometimes I'm afraid of crashing because it's like getting punched all over your body at once. Sure, I've gotten punched before and I can take it, those are more localized and it's just the kind of thing I try to avoid. Is that so crazy? Anyway, I crashed a couple of times and climbed back into the boat, with my legs aching all the way up and down. "And now you're going to pay," they said.

And so I am. I've been taking Aleve today and my legs still ache, but it's not completely the wakeboarding. Stupid old sports injury. I guess the moral here is not to let yourself slip so far into entropy that you can't do anything. I've never felt as much like the people in Wall-E as I did yesterday, so I need to come up with a plan to get out and do stuff. I just don't want to spend as much time at the gym as my friend Timmy does. It seems like he's always there.

I took a little break

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I got a little frustrated yesterday, since I've been doing the same things and haven't seen any results. Einstein said that's the definition of insanity. So I decided to break it up a little bit and do something different. I ran a few errands and watched a little James Bond with the little boy. We watched the introduction to Octopussy, which he seemed to enjoy before his nap. Then I played Batman: Arkham Asylum for a while and read a bit. I got to turn off my brain for a little bit and then let some newer ideas roll around in it. I feel more relaxed and ready to keep going. I've got a plan for something I want to do, I just need to learn more about it and I'm looking for people who can help me find the right resources to learn them. I want to learn more about bookbinding and the marketing/promotion side of book publishing. If you know something about those and are willing to share or if you know someone who I can learn them from, let me know, will you?

Typography

I just read a book entitled How to Spec Type because I wanted to learn more about setting print and layout. But as I read the book, I noticed some suggestions that involved drawing lines and estimating character counts. What? And then there were comments about how computer graphics just couldn't look as good as hand-drawn pictures yet.

So I looked at the publication date. 1987.

Most of the things that the book was explaining how to do can be done automatically by most word processing programs on computers now. It was good to learn why and what the computer's doing, but I don't think I'm going to have to hand-draw a page to give an idea of what it will look like because I can move things around on the computer in 8 different ways, print out an example of each one and figure out which one I like the best.

Important supervillain planning complete

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You know how people tend to work things out in the shower? Buckaroo Banzai says it's one of the three Bs, places where the best ideas are born: bed, bath and bus. Anyway, I was in the shower today, contemplating life, the universe, and everything when I had the most fantastic brainstorm.

I got my latest great idea for becoming a supervillain. I'd become Horst von Throatpunch and acquire both a European aristocratic title and a doctorate in something like biochemistry or international extortion by dubious means. Then I'd build a fortress high in the Alps with a helicopter pad and automated missile launchers and do evil things from there. I haven't exactly decided what schemes I would want to have, but that's the beauty of being a supervillain. I can have as many schemes as I want and one of them's bound to work sometime. I think that Blofeld would be a good example of plans that I might want to engage in like hijacking some nuclear weapons from NATO, biological warfare distributed by hypnotized socialites, giant laser in a satellite orbiting the earth, stuff like that. Those aren't clichés yet, are they?

Duke Dr. Horst von Throatpunch, undisputed ruler of the Western Hemisphere. Has a nice ring to it. Maybe that's what I'll put on my business cards.

Big blog changes

If you've read this blog in the last few months, you'll notice some big changes to the way it functions. I've updated the look because my editor complained about having to read white on black. Also, you'll notice that the RSS feed has the full text of the blog posts. I realized it was dumb to make you click through to be able to read an extra 4 lines. It's not like my thoughts are earth-shatteringly important enough to make you have to click through one more time. I'm thinking of making a couple more smallish changes still and those will probably happen sometime between now and the next blog post I write, if I actually decide to change.

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The other thing I wanted to mention today is that I've got an idea for a paper, treatise, thesis, whatever you want to call it, about the continuation of the narrative in Thomas Pynchon's novels and how it relates to TV. You know there'll be a reference to Hector Zuñiga in it. I just looked for a web link to help those of you who don't know the reference, but I couldn't find anything particularly helpful. This is the best I could do. Anyway, I think it'll be a fabulous paper, I just want to talk with someone about where would be a good place to get it out for people to read and put into their literature papers about The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow. You know, the four people each year who actually decide to write papers about that. And they probably all read this blog. (Actually, it's highly unlikely, but I'd like to think that.) Anyway, I'm excited about the idea and when it's a little better-formed, I'll bring you into the WASTE system.

Archiving

Have you figured out that I really love books yet? After reading a book called Print vs. Digital a couple of days ago, I've gotten into studying the topic of archiving. So as I usually do, I jumped straight from normal academic writing straight to the killers and am re-reading Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever. One of the interesting thoughts from it that keeps rolling around in my head is that the form, the structure of the archive itself depends on the contents of the archive. Sure, this means that art museums and libraries have different structures from each other and from concert halls, but it also means that the form of the texts (used in a very broad poststructural sense) for each kind of art vary from one another.

I've been thinking about the changing storage of information and how that is manifested in the shifts in libraries, which are our repositories for knowledge. Should they have data centers that back up the information they hold to make sure they always have access to the information they've spent many resources in acquiring and generating? And if they don't get books for you anymore, what should librarians be doing now? Do we replace librarians with computer search terminals? Of course not. They're going to become curators of the knowledge resources at the library, whether those resources are online, printed or kept in the office of some professor who's currently working on something new.

The real reason

I've been thinking a lot recently about books and their future (or lack of one, depending on your camp). Then I started trying to figure out what is it that makes me inclined to keep the printed dead trees around and the answer's rooted in the ridiculous (like most of my thoughts) but at second glance is really very practical and realistic.

Big Brother is watching.

Come on a journey with me. It starts with Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's 1984, which if you haven't read, you absolutely must. No hyperbole here because the book has so completely become part of our cultural heritage that you can't consider yourself culturally literate without having read it. From this point on, I'll just assume that you've read the books I refer to and if not, you can add them to your list of things to read. Winston's return to humanity, his reconnection with beauty is possible through his connection with Julia and with information outside the system, information not created (or more importantly, uncreated) by the Ministry of Truth.


That led me to the similar society of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Montag makes his living by burning books, routing public information and molding public opinion through the wall-sized televisions that are ubiquitous. Depictions of complex emotions and dissenting viewpoints have no place in the tele-plays and it is Montag's job to make sure that any books found don't complicate society's complacence. The parlor is the ultimate in simulating a connection between people, but it lacks any emotional content, which is one of the reasons Montag decides to read one of the books. The emotion rekindled in him and the questions he asks of his society are results of his relationship with literature.

The Eloi watch someone drown

Next, to the Eloi in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. They had no books, were perfectly content because they didn't have to do anything to provide for themselves and they still had everything they needed. Initially, their society looked like a utopia, but the lack of curiosity and mysterious appearance of food leads the traveller to look a little deeper at what's behind it all. After returning to his own time, he goes back to the future of the Eloi with three books from his shelf, the book ending with the question of which three books he took with him.


I thought about the stories I heard while I was living in the former Soviet Union about how certain books or albums were illegal to possess and they got shared in secret, passed from one person to another under fear of the KGB finding them. The literary situations are not outside the realm of possibility because I've heard stories from people who lived through it. I think that's why I believe in the future of printed books; there are still unanswered questions about the lifespan of a digital book. What happens when a powerful group gets control of the Kindle distribution system and deletes copies of 1984 from everyone's Kindle? Don't roll your eyes, that one already happened. What happens if the government decides that it's finally going to do something about Allen Ginsberg and puts something like a wiretap on the internet but rather than intercepting information, it removes all of his writings? What if something catastrophic happens and we don't have batteries or a way to charge up our e-readers? I admit that last one is a pretty remote possibility, but it's still possible. Even less possible is that you may come into possession of a time machine, travel to a future where humans have lost their curiosity, creativity and emotion and need to have some references to help them regain their humanity. But still, that may come up.


The value of printed books is in their permanence and reliability. They can be moved around outside the quick and light regular system of information, they resist revisionism, they give voice to the unpopular. It's an enduring record and fulfills the need that Writing the Body literary critics give for male authors to leave a creation that's undoubtedly theirs. It's an object that effectively conveys the declaration of the author that "I was here and I created something."

Julia Kristeva

Sure, it's convenient to have such easy access and portability of a text by using something digital, e-readers are getting cheaper to the point where they're almost disposable and the texts are infinitely reproducible at almost no cost, but there's something to be said for having a copy of something in a format that's a little harder to wash away with an errant magnetic field or some computer algorithm.


In college I had a History of Civilization class taught by the Special Collections librarian. He showed us the oldest text the university library had in its collection and he walked around with what looked like a little rock. I'd seen pictures of cuneiform writing before, heard about it in high school history classes, but here it was. A document surviving from the Babylonians, thousands of years old! Someone asked the question we all wanted to know, "What does it say?" The librarian looked up and smiled. The oldest document in the library of the most stone-cold sober university in the United States was "a receipt for beer." There were a number of ironic things about that, the first being that the university was so pleased to have this "book," which was actually a receipt for beer and anyone drinking beer at the university would have been in violation of the strict Honor Code. The other irony for me was that of all the things that could have been preserved for future generations, reflections of life and humanity from the time, we were looking at a receipt for beer. I'm concerned for the future, when our greatest thinkers and writers may have become obscured by a receipt for beer.

Play ball!

A couple of nights ago, our neighbor across the street, Tom, came over and gave us tickets to see the Orem Owlz play. That's our Pioneer League baseball team, part of the Anaheim Angels group. So yesterday, we went to the game with Tom and had a great time.

The kids had never been to a baseball game before, so they weren't sure quite what to expect. We were also a little concerned because the game started at the kids' bedtime, but we had a blast and they were such troopers. We got all the way through the tenth inning and then just couldn't keep it together any longer, so we took the kids home. But we had all kinds of fun and are so happy to have so many really nice people around us. It's making this rough time so much easier for me.

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The future of books

One of the nice things about being a university student again is that I have access to the university library again, which has books on more academic subjects, like the future of libraries. Before my accounting class one day, I ran down to the library to find books about books. I just finished one about how print and digital media fit together in the environment of a library and how libraries are changing to fit the new relationship between the two kinds of media. It was an interesting read and I've seen some of the changes already in libraries around here. I have some questions about using digital media and I think if I can come up with an answer to a couple of them, I may have a nifty business idea. Yay for text!

Books aren't dead; they're pining

Remember that blog post I wrote a little while ago about where I think books are headed? Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks that paper books aren't going away, just changing purposes. I read this blog post today and found that my view of the future of books isn't unique, which is just dandy. Here's to still having heavy cardboard boxes and large shelves to move when I decide to live someplace else. Because digital files just don't have the same smell, feel and sense of being well-loved and worn-in.

I saw Inception

So today my brother and I went to see Inception and it was great. No really. Great. I'm not going to share my theory about it with you (I definitely have one), but I'm going to just say that it would be really great if Christopher Nolan would make more action movies like this one. With the Batman movies and this one, I really would like to see him do a James Bond movie with a very cool political thriller edge. Please please pleeeeeease!

Holy busy coming up!

Next week, I have an accounting test and then the accounting final is two days later. Two accounting tests in two days. Ask me how excited I am about that. Go ahead, ask. I'm actually looking forward to it because that means I'll be finished with my accounting class. I can apparently do it, but it's still not my favorite thing to do. And then I'm going to take some other classes this fall. I don't remember what I'm doing this fall, but it'll be interesting.

So sleepy

This is a dangerous habit for me to start. Last night, I wanted to watch one of the movies on my list that I knew no one in the house wanted to watch with me and looking at the running times for each of them, decided that I'd watch the longest one since I didn't have anything pressing going on this morning. That way I could sleep in if I wanted to. Having justified it, I pushed the play button and watched The Unbearable Lightness of Being for about 30 minutes before I got interrupted by the need to be a sociable human being when my brother-in-law wanted to video chat with us. I stopped my movie, knowing full well that I had another two and a half hours left to watch whenever our chat was done.

We chatted for awhile and then I got to go back to watching my movie about Prague and the Soviet occupation. I liked it, for what that's worth but be warned that it's long. Long enough that I was up really late and now I'm going to take a nap and try to remember this for the next time I think it'd be a great idea and I don't have something important to do the next day.